Once I got to the stage where I was flying more than crashing, I started thinking about the next steps which in my mind was getting outside to fly and flying something bigger than a tiny whoop. That left me with two options buy a bigger quad or build one, and I really wanted to build one after going the easier route for the whoop. This meant I needed to get some practice soldering. Preferably on something cheaper than a $10 motor or a $40+ four-in-one ESC board. Which is when I ran across the idea of making a balance charging connector for 1S batteries.
Now you can buy one of these pretty cheaply, I got one from Amazon for less than $9. But that doesn’t get me practice with soldering or using heat shrink and is just not as fun. So I used this forum post I ran across the make one instead. It’s hard to compare the prices since the wire I bought was $7 on it’s own but I barely used any in making this. But the experience in using the soldering iron and the heat gun was well worth it to me.
Basically the batteries are wired in series so that the charge just see’s a single 4S battery in this case. The charge and discharge goes through the XT60 that I soldered on after this picture was taken, while the balance lead has the tree-like wiring to connect the individual batteries together as cells. This allows me to charge 4 1S batteries at the same time, as long as they are all identical type and very close to the same voltage. Which is why I was making a 4S one. I’d already bought a 6S one from Amazon but it meant I couldn’t use it unless I’d flown 6 packs, which some nights I didn’t do.
After that my next foray into soldering wasn’t an optional project. I dropped my radio and snapped of a switch. Not just any switch either but the switch that I’d mapped for arming the quad. Now I did just remap that function to a different switch, but it messed with my muscle memory so it wasn’t going to be a long term solution. So I ordered a new 2 position switch which ran about $5.
This wasn’t actually the first time I’d opened up the radio. When I first got it the left stick which is for throttle and yaw control had a ratchet on it. Which mean that the throttle didn’t move smoothly bit had little stops built into it. I believe this is helpful for RC planes, but it’s not good for quads, so I had already been inside to radio to change it. That time wasn’t too intimidating since I was just adjusting some screws, whereas now I was planning to do some soldering, so I was a bit more worried about screwing something up.
There’s a lot in these devices, but it really wasn’t that bad once I took a little time to look at it. I had to unscrew the old switch from the housing, then remove the heat shrink, and desolder three wires from it. None of which was too bad. The hard part was figuring out the orientation of the new switch since I didn’t think to take pictures of the old one before I removed it. I eventually noticed that the housing and the switch had matching grooves, so that clued me in enough to solder the wires back onto the new switch and put everything back in place correctly. I think the whole operation took me an hour to do, but I’m sure it would’ve taken half that time had I paid more attention to the original wiring and part orientation.
Besides learning to solder and repairing my gear, I also made some race gates. I’d gotten three orange plastic ones for my birthday and they made flying in the house a lot more fun, but I wanted a few more and didn’t want to spend $30 or more on another set. Instead I got an idea from another local pilot who made some gates using poster board and copper pipe fittings.
I made a trip to the local craft supply store for a few sheets of poster board and a couple rolls of duct tape. I already had some scrap 2×4’s and a bunch of dowel rods as well as a hot glue gun. I used the original gates I had gotten as a template for the inside dimension and then I cut six two inch strips of poster board, so I could have double pieces at the top an bottom. The thickness matched up pretty well with the smallest sized dowel that I had, so I was able to make a fork with dowels and scrap wood for the gate to slot into.
Then it was a matter of cutting pieces for the stand’s base, adding some rubber feet so they wouldn’t slide, and cutting some larger diameter dowels for the height I wanted the gate to be. I added duct tape one all four sides at the center line to help find the center of the gate when flying.
I made four of them and had enough supplies for a couple more still. They work great and I got a lot of compliments on them from the guy who’s gates I’d gotten the original idea from.
Here’s a flight from late February where I’m using both the homemade and bought gates in the house. I really got these are the right time as I’d started to get pretty tired of flying inside by this stage. I was really itching for nicer weather to get here so I could start flying outside.